1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an entry text display system in text generation and document production devices such as Japanese language word processors or office work stations having printing and editing equipment.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Generally, in a word processor for processing Japanese language, sentences are inputted through the keyboard in kana characters (similar letters in the alphabet). Thereafter, while viewing on the screen, a suitable conversion operation is effected to change some of the kana characters to corresponding kanji characters (chinese characters). When the conversion takes place, the total number of the characters used in a sentence expressed only by kana characters is often reduced after the sentence is converted to mixed kana-kanji text. Also, in Japanese word processors, the word wrapping is not necessary since in the Japanese language, it is customary to put a carriage return any place within a word. Therefore, depending on the selected format, every line within the document has the same number of spaces including characters.
In a Japanese word processor having a text generation and document processing device, kana character data entered from a keyboard is converted to mixed kana-kanji text in a as manner described above. The result of this conversion is displayed on a CRT or other display device for editing, and can be printed out in hard copy form or stored in an external storage device.
As office automation equipment has become widely used, devices offering a wide selection of font styles, character sizes, and sophisticated layout capabilities have also become common. In addition, demand is rising steadily for similar pre-print editing functions with the ability to display and interactively edit and revise the document on screen in a what you see is what you get fashion so that the user can get a feel for what the finished document will look like before it is printed in hard copy form.
However, displaying the document to be printed with its particular fonts, character sizes, and particular format (such as column editing, line spacing, character spacing and other parameters) on a CRT or other display device requires significant time to process the display data, diminishing the responsiveness essential for interactive text and layout editing, and thus making the system harder and less desirable to use. Furthermore, text insertion and editing on a conventional Japanese language word processor is performed by inserting text sequentially before the cursor position by entering the desired code of a kana or kanji character to be inserted from a keyboard. As a result, characters still not converted to kana-kanji text may be inserted over multiple lines, making it difficult to discern the new, non-converted hiragana text from the existing kana-kanji text, complicated thus resulting in operation.